DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  "You seem to be a man of considerable accomplishment. How is it you spent so many years in jail?" Lejeune said.

  "Don't rightly know, suh. Guess some niggers just ain't that smart," Junior replied.

  He heard the guard's shoes crunch on the gravel drive, as though the guard were experiencing a tension he had to run through the bottoms of his feet into the ground. But Lejeune seemed to take no notice of any sardonic content in Junior's remark.

  "Maybe you should have joined the military and found a career for yourself that didn't get you into trouble," Lejeune said.

  "I served in the United States Navy, suh. Under another name, but in the navy just the same."

  "You were a Stewart?"

  "No, suh. I was a munitions loader. I loaded munitions right next to Harry Belafonte."

  "Who?"

  "He's a singer, suh."

  "Obviously my knowledge of poplar music isn't very extensive," Lejeune said, and smiled self-indulgently at his wife.

  Why had Junior just told Lejeune of his military record or the fact he had known Harry Belafonte? It was like nipping a piece of gold through a sewer grate. At that moment he hated Lejeune more than any human being he'd ever met.

  "Would you like something to eat before you go?" Lejeune said. He held up a crystal plate on which a thick ring of crushed ice was embedded with peeled shrimp.

  "No, thank you, suh."

  "I insist," Lejeune said. He used a fork to scrape a pile of shrimp and ice on a paper plate, then inserted a toothpick in a shrimp and handed the plate to Junior. "Go back yonder and sit in the shade and eat these."

  Junior looked at the yard, the absence of chairs or scrolled-iron benches on the grass or even a glider hanging from an oak limb. "Where, suh?" he said.

  "Behind the carriage house. There's a box you can sit on. Enjoy your snack and then Mr. Posey will take you back to the camp," Lejeune said.

  "You sit right here at the table I'm going to get you some gumbo and a Coca-Cola from the house," Miss Andrea said. "Did you hear me? Put your guitar in the chair and sit down."

  "I think Mr. Crudup knows where he should eat," her husband said.

  "Castille, if you weren't so miserably stupid and insensitive, I think I'd shoot you," she replied. Then she added "God!" and went inside the house.

  Lejeune got up from his chair and walked to the driveway, where he talked quietly with the guard, Jackson Posey. Junior Crudup felt as though he were sliding to the bottom of a dark well from which he would never emerge.

  Jackson Posey did not drive the pickup truck directly back to the work camp. Instead, he crossed the bayou on the drawbridge and parked between a sugarcane field and a persimmon grove, out of sight of either the Lejeune home or the camp. He breathed hard through his nose, his mouth a tightly crimped line.

  "Get out of the truck," he said.

  "I ain't did nothing, boss."

  "You got that sonofabitch on my ass. You call that nothing?"

  "Not my fault, boss."

  They were both standing outside the truck now. The sky was hot and bright and wind was blowing dust out of the cane field and birds were clattering in the persimmon trees. Jackson Posey reached behind the driver's seat. Junior heard something hard clank against metal.

  "Drink it," Posey said.

  But Junior shook his head.

  "Good 'cause now I can send your skinny black ass right back up to "Gola."

  "Ain't nobody in the camp supposed to get the Mussolini treatment. Miss Andrea don't allow it."

  "Miz Lejeune don't write the rules now. What's it gonna be? Don't matter to me one way or another." Posey shook a cigarette loose from a package of Camels and inserted it in his mouth.

  Junior took the bottle of castor oil from the guard's hand and unscrewed the cap. The bottle was brown and heavy, the oil as viscous as syrup. He began to drink, then gagged and started again. The guard looked at his watch.

  "All of it," Posey said.

  "Ain't right, boss."

  "You messed up the man's pussy. What do you expect him to do? Like my daddy used to say, life's a bitch, then you die. Chug it down, boy."

  Posey watched while Junior finished the bottle, then fingered a reddish purple scab on his arm, one that had not been there only two days ago. He drew in heavily on his cigarette, his eyes draining, as though he were purging himself of any intimations of his own mortality.

  "It ain't nothing personal, Junior," he said.

  "It's real personal, boss."

  The guard stared emptily at the heat waves bouncing off the bayou and flicked his cigarette into the wind.

  By the time Junior got back to the camp his bowels were collapsing inside him.

  Hogman stopped his account and picked up a bottle that had fallen from his bottle tree. He wedged it in the fork of the tree and seemed to lose interest in both Father Jimmie and me and the story he had been telling.

  "Go on, Hogman," I said.

  "Junior started believing he was gonna have a life besides jailing and road-ganging. Gonna get a pardon from the governor and be a big star up Nort'. Just like Leadbelly."

  "Andrea Lejeune was going to work a pardon for him?"

  "That's what he t'ought. She made Jackson Posey keep taking Junior up to the house when Mr. Lejeune was gone. Junior talked about her all the time, how pretty she was, what she smelled like, how she had all these fine manners, how she knew every ting about his music. A whole bunch of people come up from New Orleans to hear him sing and play his twelve-string in the backyard."

  "What happened to him, Hogman?"

  "Don't know. I got paroled. Last time I seed Junior he was playing "Goodnight Irene' on the steps of his cabin, waiting to see if Miss Andrea was gonna drive by in her li'l convertible."

  "I think you're holding out on me, partner."

  "Miss Andrea got killed in a car wreck two or tree years after I left the camp. Mr. Lejeune lived up in that big house wit' just himself and his li'l girl. Junior disappeared. Ain't nothing left of him but a voice on scratchy old records. Nobody cared what happened back then. Nobody care now. You axed for the troot'. I just give it to you."

  Hogman walked inside the back of his house and let the screen door slam behind him.

  Chapter 13.

  Ordinary people sometimes do bad things. A wrong-headed business decision, a romantic encounter in a late-night bar, a rivalry with a neighbor over the placement of a fence, any of these seemingly insignificant moments can initiate a series of events that, like a rusty nail in the sole of the foot, can systemically poison a normal, law-abiding person's life and propel him into a world he thought existed only in the perverse imaginings of pulp novelists.

  At sunrise on Saturday morning the sky was pink and blue, the trees in my yard dripping from a thunder shower during the night, and I took a cup of coffee and hot milk and a bowl of Grape-Nuts out on the gallery and read the morning paper while I ate. When I was halfway into the editorial page Dr. Parks pulled his battered, beige pickup to the curb and got out. His jaws were heavy with beard stubble, one eye clotted with blood; he wore no socks and jeans that were grass-stained at the knees.

  "I need help," he said.

  "In what way?"

  He sat down on a step, a few inches from me. His long, tapered hands rested between his legs and his body gave off an odor like sour milk. His mouth began to form words, but nothing came out.

  "Take it easy, Doctor. This stuff will pass with time. A guy just needs to put one foot in front of the other for a while," I said.

  "There's no justice. Not for anything," he said.

  "Pardon?"

  "My daughter's death. The electrical fire at my house. I bought a home warranty policy from Sunbelt Construction. The policy is underwritten by a bunch of criminals in Aurora, Colorado. I tried to talk to the Louisiana insurance commissioner about it and was told he's on his way to the federal pen."

  Like most people whose lives have been left in disarray by events so large he couldn't
even describe them to himself, his rage against the universe had now reduced itself to the level of a petty financial quarrel with a fraudulent home warranty company.

  "There might be a state senator or two we can call on Monday. How about a cup of coffee?" I said. I rested my hand on his shoulder and tried to smile, then I saw the green cast in the skin under his eyes and the detached stare that made me think of soldiers I had known many years ago.

  "I was on a medevac at Khe Sanh. I was in two crashes and one shoot-down. I put my best friends in body bags. It was all for nothing. This goddamn country is going down the sewer," he said.

  "I was over there, too, Doc. We can always be proud of what we did and let the devil take the rest of it. Sometimes you've got to throw the bad times over the gunnels and do the short version of the Serenity Prayer. Sometimes you just say full throttle and fuck it."

  But my words were of no value. He got to his feet like a man walking in his sleep, then turned and extended his hand. "I insulted you at my home and in your office. I didn't mean what I said. My wife and I are better people than we seem," he said.

  He pressed the fingers of one hand against the side of his head, like a man experiencing a pressure band or a level of cerebral pain that gave him no relief. He pulled open the door of his pickup and got inside, holding the steering wheel to steady himself. I walked to the passenger window.

  "Where you headed?" I asked.

  "To confront the people who cheated me, the ones who put defective wiring in my house, the ones who shouldn't be on the goddamn planet."

  "I don't think that's a good idea, Doc."

  "Stand away from the truck," he replied. He ground the transmission into gear and swung the truck into traffic, almost hitting an automobile packed with Catholic nuns.

  I went back inside and called the dispatcher. Wally happened to be on duty. "You want us to pick up this guy, Dave?" he asked.

  I thought about it. Roust Dr. Parks now, in his present state of mind, and we would probably only add to his grief and anger. With luck he would eventually go home or at worst get drunk somewhere, I told myself. "Let it go," I said.

  Helen Soileau called me just after lunch. "How busy are you?" she said.

  "What's up?"

  "It's Dr. Parks. Wally said you called in on him earlier."

  "What about him?"

  "Evidently he went looking for Castille Lejeune. He didn't find him, so he went after this guy Will Guillot."

  "What do you mean 'he went after him'?"

  "With a cut-down double-barrel twelve-gauge."

  "He shot Guillot?" I said.

  "You got it backwards. Parks is dead. Say good-bye to our prime suspect in the drive-by daiquiri shooting."

  "Wait a minute. I can't get this straight. Parks is dead?"

  "At least he was five minutes ago. Get pictures if you can," she said.

  When I got to the home of Will Guillot emergency vehicles were still parked along the street and barricades set up to prevent the curious and the voyeuristic from driving past the house. The incongruity of the images there would not fit in time and place. In a tree-covered neighborhood of nineteenth-century homes and thick St. Augustine lawns, where the hydrangeas and impatiens and Confederate roses were softly dented by the breeze, and blue jays and robins sailed in and out of the live oaks, Dr. Parks lay on his side in the driveway, his mouth and eyes locked open, one cheek pressed flat against the cement, a pool of dried blood issuing from a ragged hole in his throat into the sunlight. Six inches from his outstretched hand lay a cut-down twelve-gauge, the stock wood-rasped and sanded into a pistol grip.

  The crime-scene investigator was a nervous, tightly wrapped man with a strong cigarette odor by the name of Dale Louviere. When I ducked under the crime-scene tape he glared into my face, as though challenged, nests of green veins pulsing in his temples. Before he had entered law enforcement he had been a gofer and point man for a notorious casino operator in Lake Charles.

  "What do you want, Robicheaux?" he said.

  "Dr. Parks was part of an Iberia Parish homicide investigation. Where's the coroner?" I said.

  "Him and the sheriff fish together on Saturday. We're still waiting on them," Louviere replied.

  "Are there any witnesses?"

  "Yeah, the shooter, Will Guillot. He's in the kitchen."

  "How do you read it?" I asked.

  "Open and shut. The vie went nuts about a house fire or a home warranty policy or something. He came here to wax Guillot and instead caught a .45 in the throat. The round hit the oak tree in front."

  I leaned over to look more closely at the cut-down twelve-gauge. I couldn't see a brand name on it, but the steel around the magazine was incised with delicately engraved images of ducks and geese in flight. "Handsome gun to chop down with a hacksaw," I said.

  "Get some mud in the barrel and that's what people do, Robicheaux," Louviere replied.

  "Except this guy was a collector. How many collectors spend their time converting their firearms into illegal weapons?"

  "The next time I investigate a homicide, I'll have the crime scene shipped to Iberia Parish so you can supervise it," he said.

  I walked through the porte cochere to a back door and entered the kitchen without knocking. Will Guillot was at the counter, gazing out the back window into the yard, while he ate a ham-and-lettuce sandwich. A tall, half-empty glass of milk rested by his sandwich plate. He turned and looked at me quizzically, the birthmark that drained like purple dye from his hairline to the corner of his eye al most obscured by shadow, so that one side of his face looked like the marred half of a large coin.

  "You were in fear for your life, were you, Mr. Guillot?" I said.

  "Yeah, I guess that describes it," he answered, one cheek stiff with a piece of bread. "You have jurisdiction here?"

  "You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to."

  "I don't want to."

  "Fair enough. On an unrelated subject, are you a hunter or a gun collector?"

  "I hunt. Why?"

  "No reason. Were you in "Nam?"

  "No. What's that have to do with anything?"

  "Dr. Parks was on a medevac. He had his problems, but I don't think he was a violent man. I don't think that cut-down twelve on the driveway was his, either."

  "This conversation is over, Mr. Robicheaux, and you can get out of my house."

  "Does it bother you?" I said.

  "Bother me? That I defended myself against a lunatic?"

  "His daughter was burned alive after buying liquor illegally at one of Castille Lejeune's daiquiri shops. His house burned after you put bad wiring in it, and you shot him to death after he came here to complain about a fraudulent home warranty policy you sold him. It's hard to believe one guy can have that much bad luck, isn't it? Enjoy your sandwich, Mr. Guillot. I'll be in touch," I said.

  "Kiss my ass," he said.

  Sunday Father Jimmie had gone to Lafayette to collect signatures on a petition to shut down drive-by daiquiri windows and had stayed the night at a retreat house in Grand Coteau. I ate a plate of clam spaghetti at a cafe in Jeanerette, then went to sleep reading T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, with Snuggs on the foot of the bed. My windows were open and in my sleep I heard the wind in the trees, a solitary pecan husk rattle on the tin roof, a workboat chugging heavily on the bayou. The air was cool and clean smelling with ground fog, rainwater ticking in the trees, and I felt Snuggs walk across my back so he could sniff the breeze blowing through the screen. Just after midnight, my bowels constricted as though I had swallowed a piece of broken glass. I went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet, my thighs trembling with nausea.

  Then I heard someone wedge a tool between the back door and the jamb, splinter the deadbolt, and enter the house. Whoever it was moved quickly toward the band of light at the bottom of the bathroom door, opened it slightly, and looked in at me.

  "I wasn't planning to meet you like this, but I couldn't resist the opportunity. Can I be getting
you anything? You don't look too well," the figure said.

  "Coll?"

  "Right you are. No, don't get up. Take care of business while I have my say, then I'll be off." His hand came through the opening and removed the key from the lock. He shut the door and locked it from the outside.

  "What do you think you're doing?" I said.

  I heard him go into the bedroom, then scrape a chair into position. "This is a fine cat you have here. Been in a few fights, has he?"

  "Listen, Coll "

  "He's got a real pair of bandoliers back there."

  My face was cold with sweat, a bilious fluid rising from my stomach. Gray spots danced before my eyes.

  "Father Dolan and I have nothing to do with your life," I said.

  "Oh, but you do. Two rather nasty cretins just arrived in town, Mr. Robicheaux, the cousins of Frank Dellacroce. Stone killers, they are, sir, with no parameters and no charitable impulses. Evidently a few of the grease balls think you blew poor Frank's head off. Would you like to hear what they did to a friend of mine?"

  "No."

  "Took a blowtorch to him. What's the name of your cat?"

  "Snuggs."

  "What a fine little fellow. Built like a fucking fire hydrant. It's a shame the innocent suffer. But maybe that's the only thing that causes us to take action."

  I could feel my heart quicken. "What are you saying?"

  "I didn't make the world. I just live in it as best I can. I'll be going now."

  "You leave that cat here."

  But he didn't reply. I heard his chair scrape but did not hear him set Snuggs down. "Coll? Did you hear me?" I yelled.

  I heard him banging about in the kitchen, then a hard, clunking sound and his footsteps going heavily through the house and out the front door. By the time I was able to climb out the bathroom window, the yard and the street were empty, the ground puffing with fog, the moon as bright as a white flame behind the skeletal outline of a water oak.

  I went around back and entered the house through the kitchen door. A pitcher of milk rested on the drain board and Snuggs was lapping from a bowl next to it, one Max Coll had filled with both milk and dry cat food.